The Soggy State of Book Reviewing

Bored with my ramblings? Read a professional on a topic close to my heart: "Critical Condition" by James Wolcott.

Two Fragments

I am taking a break from writing a paper on Waiting for Godot to present two small ideas that could be expanded into book-length treatises of staggering genius:

1-Symbolist drama, considered the beginning of the modern European avant-garde, was birthed at roughly the same time as modern realist theater. Both Emile Zola’s treatises on naturalism and Maurice Maeterlinck’s essays and plays were, if not contemporaneous, within a decade or so of each other. And yet, the practitioners of every modern avant-garde movement, beginning with Symbolism, have positioned themselves in opposition to the means and premises of the realist theater. Reading such arguments today, we are not puzzled. Realism has come to so dominate our own theatrical world that we are immediately in empathy with artists like Maeterlinck in their frustration with realism and naturalism. Looked at historically, however, it is puzzling that there should be such fury over a theory of the drama (realism) that was, at the time, only in swaddling clothes (as opposed to the Romantic refutation of neo-classicism, which were nearly two centuries apart from each other in their respective geneses).

I wonder if it is time to tell a new version of dramatic history in which the avant-garde does not rise up to replace realism but in which there was a great schism in the wake of Romanticism, by which dramatic history took two separate paths: Realism and Anti-Realism (or, the Avant-Garde). These two dramaturgical paths continue to be walked on, and while they interact and in many ways inform each other, they remain parallel. The history of theater since the end of the 19th century is a dialectical struggle between Realism and Anti-Realism that has yet to be resolved. Just a thought.

2-It occurs to me that the blog, in its insistence on separating thoughts and arguments into pieces that are not expected to make a whole, marks a resurgence of the Romantic idea of the fragment, by which universal “truths” are reached by small tick-tacks rather than massive swings of the ax. Just a thought.

On Celebrity

Today a good friend of mine and I were sitting together in a coffee shop. My friend had his computer open and was buzzing around online. He turns to me and says, “Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter just had a baby.” And so a definition of “celebrity” occurred to me.

Celebrity: A condition of being by which complete strangers in an obscure coffee shop halfway around the world casually discuss the birth of your child.

Quick thought

I think Euripides's play Helen should be revived, using lots of television screens to conjure a world in which the only "reality" is imagery. Alex Eaton should do videography. Elizabeth LeCompte should direct. I should dramaturg and (also) make all the money.

From the draft of my paper on Helen:

Reading the play’s first scene, Helen’s difficult-to-stage prologue about her sorry personal history and the “lives…lost in numbers,” I can’t help imagining her watching a TV news segment or documentary on herself and the recent devastation in Ilium. Images of fire and bloodshed have become the domain of television (and film) and would signal to the audience the degree of the gods’ cruelty. I should further suggest that television screens are especially appropriate in a play about surfaces and people mistakenly believing their eyes. On the Greek stage, Euripides can only conjure the vast landscape of his play—the ashes of Ilium, Helen’s family in Sparta, the Greek ships foundering on the ocean, the cave containing Menelaus’s soldiers and the Helen hologram, the inside of Theoclymenus’s palace, the ship where the Egyptian soldiers will be deceived and murdered by Spartan trickery—through a broad web of monologues and messenger scenes. Today, these worlds could all be conjured on the flat imagery of televisions that move across the stage like an extra set of eyes. The skepticism of today’s audiences towards the media would support the link between our own world of images and Helen’s.

Help Wanted?

I just saw Help Wanted: A Personal Search for Meaningful Employment at the Start of the 21st Century, a monologue by the young performer/monologist Josh Lefkowitz. Although it was far from a masterpiece, I can’t help being reminded how much I enjoy solo performances and monologues, even though it’s a form that I really don’t understand on a theoretical or even formal level. How does it work when it works well? What separates the good from the bad? I’m convinced it’s not just the charisma of the performer, since I’ve seen strong performers give rotten solo plays (cf. All That I Will Ever Be). It’s something about the quality and depth of the storytelling. The challenge, really, is to convince the audience that your banal story about your life matters in a big way. Lefkowitz didn’t quite get there, but there was more than one part of his play that was truly moving and will probably stick with me (such as his mantra: “What Would Spalding [Gray] Do?”), and I think he has the potential to someday write a great show.

I can’t say that his piece was illuminating in regards to one of my main personal struggles right now, which is figuring out what the heck I want to do with my life (or even my immediate future). His conclusion, if he had one at all, was that we should all just keep our pens scratching no matter what happens.

Do I keep my pen scratching (no)? Do I always do what Spalding would do (which, for Lefkowitz, largely means listening to everyone’s stories and talking to as many strangers as possible)? No. Is my ego and ambition matched by my follow-through and work ethic? No. Am I writing diary entries into a blog purely because I hope someone will read my ramblings and pretend that they matter? Yes. Have I started any of my final papers yet? No.

So, that’s my entry for the day.

But I LIKE postmodernism!!

As you know, fearless and new reader, I’ve just finished the excellent book Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. An interested quality of the book is that its author, Christopher Butler, is as skeptical as he is knowledgeable about postmodernism, and he includes his own critiques of the movement alongside his explanations of it. He boils down the essence of his critique in his statement, during his last chapter, that “the best that one can say here, and I am saying it, is that postmodernists are good critical deconstructors, and terrible constructors.” In other words (and hugely oversimplified): Postmodernism does a great job of dismantling the ideas of “truth” and “reality,” but it doesn’t offer a practical exit strategy from the miasma its theories create. Butler seems to think that this inherent weakness makes it, despite its surface muscularity, an ultimately rather limp set of theoretical frameworks. Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes are great, but how do you use these philosophies to strategize political activism and change? What do you do with the problem that any critique of truth-making systems must depend on an idea of “truth” and the philosopher’s assumption that (s)he recognizes its imposters (even if everything is an imposter—I can hear Plato CHOKING in his grave). As a result of these critiques, Butler virtually gives up on postmodernism by the book’s end, and he predicts that its “enduring achievements” will take place in the arts rather than in politics or philosophy. Like Romanticism (via Wagner) for Nietzsche—the death of postmodernism is to become a style.

Reading Butler’s criticisms, I come to an awareness of my own prejudices regarding the viability of postmodernist theory. Since my induction into Judith Butler in college, and M. Foucault since, I have found myself skeptical of ANY theory written today that does not take into account postmodernist ideas of power, language, and discourse. I see any theory that doesn’t at least acknowledge, for example, that identity is constructed in and through language, as not fully fleshed out, based on primitive ontologies that don’t hold, and therefore not to be trusted.

I think that you can’t discount the usefulness of postmodernism theory just because it hasn’t found a way out of itself yet. I maintain a foolish Hegelian faith that it can and it will, and I am skeptical of any optimistic philosophy that does not work through—rather than around—this set of ideas that I believe have changed the face of the world. Mr. Butler seems to want us to go around postmodernism to whatever its next phase is (so do fundamentalists, in an entirely different way, but are their anxieties so far apart?). I hold out hope that we can move through it.

And may I posit, tentatively, that at least one exit strategy that is 100% a product of postmodernist theory is queerness? The idea of queer identity—which really boils down to the permission to be whomever and however you want to be, and that the only label that is allowed to even begin to contain you is your name (if you choose)— is the idea that brought me into this theoretical world to begin with and will continue to hold me in its sway. Queerness, for me, is THE truly libratory product of postmodernism, the exit strategy and the hope for the future.

Cf. Belize’s vision of heaven, delivered to a dying Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika.

Anyway, clearly I only understand 20% of what I’ve read and 3% of what I’ve written, but that is what blogs are for.

Another idea: I am increasingly beginning to conceive the idea of “realism and its double”— that all (successful? valuable?) executions of dramatic realism are simultaneously dependent on at least one other dramatic model. Reading this book, I wonder if one can simultaneously argue for a “non-realism and its double,” for don’t all conceptions of anti-reality depend on an idea of reality as much as atheism depends on an idea of God?

Now here’s an interesting object, from Amazon.com. Oh ye theorists of books as objects of culture, discuss:

We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000, and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself--all 157 pages of it. It's bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

Two Worlds, Two Couches

Today I was sitting in the Yale Bookstore in a comfy couch reading my latest book for pleasure (there are so few of these in my life as a student): Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. I was reading about art as politics, and about critiques of postmodernist art as politically ineffectual and preaching to the converted (arguments I only partially disavow). The book, as most of my books, implicitly assumed a liberal political agenda (can postmodernism be conservative?). At this point, I came up for air and turn to my right, where I saw another man, perhaps in his 50s, reading, with as much interest and focus as I had been reading, Day of Reckoning by Patrick J. Buchanan. To add to the surreality, Christmas music was playing in the background.

If I could have been a camera and photographed the two of us reading together, I think I would have had quite the artistic object on my hands. I’m not quite sure what it all means—certainly something about irony, America, and, indeed, postmodernism. What perhaps struck me most was how each of us are living in worlds entirely separate from each other. How could I have even begun to develop a relationship with this man? What could he possibly think about the homosexual reading about feminist performance art in the chair next to him? And yet, neither of us were bothering each other, and I imagine if I had smiled at him he would have smiled back to me, and it would have been genuine for both of us.

Maybe I’ll put it in a play someday.